An Ethical Duty to Stop Producing New Lawyers?
It’s no secret that the job market for entry-level attorneys is in the toilet. Particularly if you’re a third-year law student at a third-tier (or lower) private school, face it: you’ve paid upwards of $100,000 in tuition only to become part of a vicious counterclockwise swirl of stench and despair. Indeed, the term “human waste” has probably never been so applicable as it is to you. But before being gulped into the plumbing of professional poverty with a throaty roar, you should at least understand what’s been happening in that porcelain bowl.
The middle-finger on the flusher doesn’t belong to Biglaw—it belongs to the greedy (or desperate) hand of your law school. Assuming optimistically that there are still some jobs out there for bright freshly-minted lawyers, there are still simply too many lawyers. And there are too many law graduates because law school bigwigs lack the ethical fortitude to shrink (or eliminate) enrollment. Sure, maybe it should be the prospective student’s job not to be duped into entering an already-overstocked profession. But the student is in an inferior bargaining position, and in any event is just trying to make use of his useless liberal arts degree—which he got because he couldn’t make ends meet with his high school diploma—which is valueless because things like dropout prevention programs produce a glut of high school graduates.
But something can be done to calm and cleanse the turbulent, crowded waters of the chamber pot into which many fledgling legal minds have been so inexpertly plopped: law schools should shut down. Perhaps that idea sounds preposterous, but the result is largely inevitable—at least for the lower-ranked schools. Those institutions can either shut their doors, allowing the existing legal work force to gain much-needed traction, or simply wait for market forces to convince students that enrolling in their law school is not a worthwhile or cost-efficient undertaking. Perhaps the latter is already taking place to some extent, as it is even becoming difficult to become part of the legal education machine. In theory, only those schools (and faculty) that can provide their students with a guarantee of lucrative employment will survive the test of time.
But unfortunately, capitalism just isn’t working fast enough. Moral free-agency can be much more effective here. Law schools—whose curricula uniformly include courses on professionalism and ethics in which the “self-governing” character of the legal community is touted—should exercise some self-governance and take immediate steps to lessen (or cease) their production of new attorneys. After a sufficient amount of time has passed, the need for younger, cheaper legal labor will arise, justifying anew the career decisions of those bright-eyed boys and girls who are bound for law school.
You might be thinking, “Is it right to criticize law schools when the problem of educational inflation arguably began much earlier in the academic chain?” Yes. High school and college graduates don’t compete (or at least shouldn’t be able to compete) for those jobs sought by lawyers, whose post-graduate training costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. The only responsible way to address low lawyer demand is to keep the lawyer supply even lower; and the gatekeeper for lawyers is not the K-12 regime or the undergraduate circus, but the law school itself.
Perhaps eventually there will once again be a market for fresh-faced law graduates. But until then, it will be nothing short of cruel for the legal education industry to continue sabotaging the careers of its own alumni by maintaining its mass-production of entry-level attorneys—who will themselves face the same sickening cauldron of student debt and economic blight. If ethical decision-making means choosing the right thing, then perhaps it is the ethical duty of law schools to slake their thirst for esteem and tuition cash, to forgo the profitable cycle of student and alumni victimization, and thus to begin purifying the bitter waters in which their downtrodden progeny currently steep.
True.
Umm…so I take it you don’t have employment lined up? Would you have bored us with this rant if you had a job offer at some blue-chip Wall Street firm? I’ll just list some of the problems in your logic:
1. Most law schools are non-profit. Therefore, profit cannot be the motivation for them to continue in the face of an economic downturn. Maybe they actually have the audacity to believe that their mission to train lawyers is not linked to your future salary.
2. Assuming it’s rational for law schools to shut down (it’s not), why should it be the “lower-ranked” schools that shut down? First of all, has no one clued you in to the fact that rankings are arbitrary and uninformed guesses based on nothing more than some jackass’ opinion? Secondly, according to your “economic” argument, shouldn’t it be the schools in locales with the highest number of lawyers per capita that should shut down?
3. Who would go first? What idiot administrator would volunteer to fire his faculty and quit his job before any other school had done so? Have you considered that a slightly more practical idea might be for all law schools to agree to draw down acceptance rates across the board?
4. Finally (and I think most obviously), are you aware that your suggestion is terribly misguided if in fact the economic downturn is a temporary one? Isn’t it possible that the reason law schools are not shutting down is that they–rightly–expect the economy to recover??
Paul,
1. While the schools themselves may be non-profit, they pay their deans and faculty hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries. This they cannot do without maintaining cash flow in the form of tuition. Thus, it is rather irrelevant what they “believe” their “mission” to be.
2. Your characterization of the rankings is clearly a joke, otherwise I would berate it. And even if the rankings are based on nothing more than someone’s opinion, that opinion is perhaps the strongest corollary available for institutional prestige and the accompanying likelihood that a degree from a given school will enable its graduates to compete for world-class jobs. Chief Justice Roberts, after all, did not graduate from Elon. Next, the reason lower-ranked schools should be first to decrease production is that they do a greater disservice to their students by maintaining operations than do top-ranked schools: until a degree from a low-ranked school is worth the abhorrent price one pays for it (in terms of average starting salary), it is cruel for those schools to keep cranking out lawyers who will be relegated to the lowest rungs in the profession, statistically or economically speaking. If the upper-echelon schools are also overpriced, they should scale back as well; but I don’t think a law degree from Duke (for example) has become “not worth it” yet.
3. The “who goes first” problem is what caused me to write the post in the first place. There is no reason—other than recognizing an ethical duty—to be “first” to decrease one’s institution’s revenues, whether by shutting doors completely or by scaling back enrollment. Your proposal of having schools scale back operations simultaneously is a good attempt to keep some market competition involved, but I doubt an idea that is as “irrational” as you seem to believe mine to be will receive equal buy-in from enough institutions to make it count. Besides, I have already conceded the apparent preposterousness of my suggestion, so marrying it to a practical compromise seems like mixing oil and water.
4. If the downturn is indeed temporary, my suggestion is actually the guarantor of unheralded riches and opportunity for those who remain in the profession; for if the economy booms, a healthy shortage of lawyers will justify higher legal fees and (ultimately) more lawyers. But continuing to train lawyers before such a recovery is putting the cart dangerously before the horse.